


Eigengrau

by Echinoderma



Category: Subarashiki Kono Sekai | The World Ends With You
Genre: Gen or Pre-Slash, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, teeny tiny shipping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-26
Updated: 2015-02-26
Packaged: 2018-03-15 07:34:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3438908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Echinoderma/pseuds/Echinoderma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's agreeing with him, which means Neku's right, but actually wrong, in a completely correct kind of way. The idea is there but he missed something vital on his way to the conclusion. Of course Joshua would make him backtrack a maze just to get to the room they’d started in all along. </p><p> </p><p>Rooftop confessional in the rain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eigengrau

**Author's Note:**

> exciting features: vague conversations, style changes, sudden leaps of logic, the idea that joshua might be able to have a serious conversation about something if he wanted it badly enough
> 
> eigengrau ("intrinsic gray") is a term for the uniform dark gray background that many people report seeing in the absence of light.

  
\------

  
It's the middle of summer and it's been raining for days, but this is the biggest storm he's seen yet, pounding against the walls and screaming like a child.

Neku is, reasonably, asleep when the rain intensifies in the middle of the night, the gentle tapping growing, surging until it drowns out all else but the terrible roar of thunder, and the cacophonous calls of the city below. _Come on_ the air whispers, sing-song melody and bright brass notes, a symphony that rises to meet each crash of bass, rushing into a crescendo that peaks, holds, and drops into an energetic trill, waiting for the lighting to strike again. It shakes him out of bed, tugging at the hem of his thoughts, tiny psychic fingers prodding at his subconscious. He lopes up to the rooftop of his apartment building, the music calling to him incessantly. Impossible to resist in its naked enjoyment of the storm.

Wind whips the door open and Neku raises his arms in protest, a blast of invasive, humid air filling the stairway, his thin nightshirt soaked through in a second. Swirling, charcoal clouds hang low in the sky, almost scraping the buildings, fog and rainwater sitting above the ground in a soft, white haze. In the mist he can barely make out the slender form of another, ashen hair and violet eyes and a translucent film of skin-

Joshua is standing, looking over the side of the building and shaking, wet hair slicked back and his clothes a mess of wrinkles bunched at his joints and of course the thought to come to the roof wasn’t his own, he would never do something so utterly stupid without some kind of Composer mind game behind it. Neku walks closer, feels himself bristle, not convinced he didn't call him up to the roof just to push him off.

"You're on my roof." He points out the obvious because it's all he has to go on, struggling to be heard over the crash of water on steel. Joshua doesn't even glance in his direction, raising his arms to the sky just as another bolt of lightning rips apart the sky and the thunder smashes into them like a cresting wave. An eternity, and when he finally turns around it's the same smug curl of lips and loose slant of shoulders, but Joshua's eyes are glimmering, manic and bright and mostly pupil, the Music pouring out of him anything but the cool indifference Neku's come to expect.

"Oh? Why Neku, I had no idea you lived here." Joshua chirps, brushing water-laden hair from his cheeks. "What a pleasant surprise."

“Can’t you bother me during the day? And not at three in the morning?” He runs the back of his hand across his eyes to clear his vision and only succeeds in turning the world into blurry, diffused grey. Neku doesn’t bother asking why are you here, knowing the rain would turn to fire and the wind to sulphur before he got a straight answer from so direct a question. “Whatever you want from me the answer is no.”

“So conceited.” Joshua chuckles before motioning vaguely at the sky. “I’ll have you know I’m actually just here to watch the rain. I really had no intentions of running into you at all.”

Sure. “My mistake, this is just a terrible coincidence. I’ll leave you to it.” He deadpans, spinning on his heel to go back down the stairwell only to find the door wedged shut and very, very locked. He thumps his head against the surface, eyes screwed shut in irritation. “Well damn. Bad news, it looks like I’m trapped up here.”

“Golly.” Laughter, almost inaudible under the rain and the sound of Neku’s teeth grinding together. “How did you manage that? I don’t suppose you can call for help, hmm?”

“Nope, didn’t think to bring my phone with me in the middle of the night, in a thunderstorm, on the off chance that the wind would lock me out so you and I could do a little sightseeing together.”

A thoughtful pause. “Foresight never was your strong suit.”

Neku rolls his eyes so hard he's afraid he might sprain something, but he has trouble keeping the scowl on his face with the giddy chime of Music around them, a frenetic tempo Neku wouldn't associate with Joshua in a million years. Lively and star-bright and almost a tangible shimmer against the monochrome grey. Neku is- wary, but less so, exposed to this strange new facet of Joshua, something glassy and fragile and dangerously approaching genuine. The storm, too, is a sight to behold, nature in its raw form, unstoppable and utterly indifferent to the tiny machinations of the humans below. Tentatively, he edges closer to the end of the rooftop, watches the shapeless mass of their shadows grow when lightning arcs above them. For a while that's all it is and it almost feels okay, the rest of the world vacating the theatre to give them center stage.

"You know, the sky looked just like this when I died." Joshua grins and oh there it is, the bullet that shatters the silence between then and Neku chokes on steam and lets his jaw hang before he can think of something to say. He wonders how he could ever be surprised, as if Joshua could ever show up and not involve in his dark and murky morality and while his mind races with why why why this all he can manage verbally is a breathless "what?"

"It was one of the worst storms in years. It was perfect." Joshua beams at him before gazing reverently at the darkened sky. "I got the idea from the reapers- their wings. I wanted to fly, Neku. Fly away from the monotony, the utter banality of living. It wasn't a building much taller than this one."

"Josh-" he starts but his statement quickly falters, at a complete loss for words in the face of the sudden exposition.

"It hurt terribly, of course, when I hit the ground. In the autopsy they found I'd shattered a considerable number of bones. It was raining, like I said. The middle of the day, but the sky was as dark as midnight.” He pauses, smiling fondly at the thought “Afterward I attended my own funeral and everything.". I don't think I'd ever been so happy, to be out of this stupid, mundane world and into something bigger."

(And really, what do you say to that?)

"...Oh, close your mouth, Neku. You look like a fish."

Now that was familiar territory, Joshua sniping at him from his careful construct of nonchalance, detailing his death with all the intensity of someone chatting about yesterday’s lunch. "I know you were wondering. And who knows what conclusions you would have dreamed up on your own."

Neku pulls it together a second later. "If you think pouring your heart out to me is going to make me feel sorry for you, try again."

"Don't get so defensive. Trust your partner, right?" Joshua simpers. Neku’s snorts deep, from the throat, mulling over the information he just learned. He isn't surprised, the implications obvious from their brief week together; but he never expected to have the details, and he’s trying to find the breadcrumb trail in the overgrown forest, Joshua opening up to him so he will… what?

"I see those little gears turning in your head. Penny for your thoughts?"

"If I didn't know better, I'd say you were guilty. Trying to confess." Neku flatlines, arms crossed. "But I do know better, and I know you don’t give up anything without being as obtuse as possible. So you really want to talk about something else."  
The words are laced thickly with venom, Joshua taking it in as easy as oxygen.

“Something about the game, I'm guessing?"

  
_...wait._

The other boy titters, wrapping a lock of hair around his fingers. "Maybe you should moonlight as a detective, Neku. Your powers of deduction are something to behold."

He's agreeing with him, which means Neku's right, but actually wrong, in a completely correct kind of way. The idea is there but he missed something vital on his way to the conclusion. Of course Joshua would make him backtrack a maze just to get to the room they’d started in all along.

“-I can’t forgive you.” He blurts before the thought is even fully formed in his mind.

  
_...Is that it?_

  
There is a long, drawn moment, the lines of tension woven between them like spider silk, triplines in the air. Neku feels the fluttery beat of his heart, uncertain and maybe a little afraid- who’s to say Joshua is any less homicidal this time around- and maybe he’s given too much, overshot his confession. He can’t imagine anything more presumptuous, that he could predict the wants of Shibuya’s Composer, omniscient and divine, with powers he could never comprehend. As if his opinion were worth any more than that of the worms squirming in the dirt.

“So you’ve said.” But Joshua’s voice is suddenly distant, toneless and frosty, and oh. “Is it so bad, looking back at it? Aren’t you better now for it? What did your old existence provide that makes you fight so furiously, Neku-?”

“You’re such a fucker.” He snarls in the middle of Joshua’s little spiel. “You and your goddamn ego, you have no idea why- you can’t even pretend to be even the tiniest bit sorry. This isn’t about some stupid grand celestial plan bullshit, Joshua. This is different.” Neku steps closer, livid and his skin crawling and tendons taut and he’s on fire, burning on the inside in contrast to Joshua’s ice-cold indifference. “You hurt me.”

And it’s so simple, so human. Neku can’t forgive him because Joshua has never said he’s sorry, not at all, for all this false vulnerability and it isn’t the same. It isn’t the same, not even close, how Joshua got to choose, and Neku- did not.

“Is this your version of an apology? Some kind of ‘ _killing myself worked for me, so why wouldn’t it work for you_ ’ thing? Am I supposed to thank you, oh _great Composer_? For playing with my life like it’s nothing? Just so you could dangle your little gifts in front of me and say ‘jump’-"

He stops shouting because Joshua’s eyes are as ugly as the storm, narrowed and focused on some nebulous point inside him.

You certainly are testing my patience." He whispers, urgently wrapping his bony fingers in Neku's waterlogged nightshirt. "Is that all you think that was?" He yanks him closer, the two of them chest-to-chest on the edge of disaster, and Joshua looks like carved quartz, a maelstrom of light flickering under his crystal skin. Neku's heart stutters in fear- that he'll lose his balance and fall down, down, down and splat, like a raindrop.

"Sometimes,” He hisses, “You have to destroy what’s already there to make way for something greater. To remind you of how small your world and your reality is. My body was holding me back, it was a prison, flawed and tiny and meaningless in the grandness of it all, the world extending only as far as my dull senses could perceive." A mirthless laugh tickles Joshua's throat and his tongue darts out to lick moisture from his lips; he continues speaking, a glamour settling over his voice like glitter and forget the building- Neku feels like they’re standing on top of the world, a thousand miles up and suspended in the inky, endless void. "An artist sees the potential of greatness in things- and makes it real." Neku watches drops catch on the soft fringe of Joshua's eyelashes, the world sighing around him. "I saw what I could become, and I saw how to achieve it. All I had to do was let myself go."

He’s staring through him, trembling, bulging violet eyes and a smile that curves too sharply and flashes too much teeth, and his voice wavers with the weight of all his years. "That is what art is Neku. It moves through you, makes you better than you are. Art is destruction, and reincarnation. A cycle- an endless process that strives towards perfection." The world draws closer, stills around them, as Joshua's eyes flutter shut. Neku aware of the rivulets of water and sweat and cells running down his cheeks, into his neck, pooling in his collarbones and the valleys of his ribs. Of the other's lack of breath, the total stillness of his body, a thrumming vibrato melody in his chest in lieu of a heartbeat.

“And you, Neku, I saw the potential in you. In a way that you couldn’t. I let you go."

Neku is just tired, the effort wrapping his head around the warped reasoning strenuous, and for a moment he wonders if the whole thing is staged; the storm, the roof, the suicide, all so perfectly melodramatic, just to tell Neku the answer to why he was chosen. Maybe Joshua thought the poignancy of their setting would convince him of his awful truths.

“You just can’t make decisions like that, Joshua. It’s wrong.” You’re wrong he wants to scream, he wants to shake Joshua until all of his little Composer thoughts come tumbling out of him and all that’s left is the tiny mass of humanity and ennui at his core.

“I am an artist.” Is all he says, and brushing water off of Neku’s cheek, a ghostly afterimage left with every twitch of his fingers. “If I don’t direct the materials, who will?"

"You- not everything needs to be controlled.." Neku murmurs in slow and careful tones, the pleading voice of a man backing down from a lion. "You can just… let the inspiration take you, you know? Art, people, they can surprise you, if you let them."

Neku feels the sigh on his lips, dead air rushing through Joshua's lungs, and shivers.

Above them, the torrential pour had calmed into a gentle shroud of mist, bits of clear black sky peeking through the cover. Joshua’s fingers slowly uncurl from the collar of his shirt, but he doesn't move away; instead he splays his hand against Neku’s torso, fingertips pressed into the spaces between his ribs.

"Neku."

He doesn't hear so much as feel Joshua say his name, a gentle vibration under his skin, the outline of the Composer's body a soft, prismatic, blur.

“Would you even believe me, if I said it?” Joshua ventures, still and stoic, not meeting Neku's eyes. “That I regret what I did? To everyone, to Shibuya? To you?”

 

 

  
_What, indeed?_

“I-” _Wouldn’t believe you_ , he almost blurts, but he stops the impulse of old Neku and thinks, really thinks. “-Trust you. I would trust you, If you said it.” Trust not believe, putting the weight on Joshua’s end, for him to uphold.  
And _oh, what is happening, what is this?_ \- Joshua leans forward the slightest bit and kisses him. It lasts for a split second, soft and chaste and not quite tangible, like seaspray against Neku’s lips; he doesn’t even have time to be surprised, to push him away or draw him closer.

_"Maybe you're right."_

And then Joshua shoves him, _the absolute fucker_ , and Neku is falling, falling, falling, and Joshua is already gone, dissolved into diamond dust, and with the wind and rain rushing past his ears he thinks, maybe, he hears a chorus, and a thousand chiming bells-

 

 

 

-And he wakes, safe and stationary in his own bed, to a pre-dawn sky streaked with salt. All Neku can think of is the stifling air wrapped around his clammy skin, and the contented hum of the city ringing in his ears.

 

_(---i'm sorry)_

  
end.


End file.
